How does a creator ‘figure things out’ and become successful? I was just asked that question on a podcast (coming out in a few weeks), and there are a million ways I could answer that sound smart, but only one that rings true: Experimentation. Unfortunately, experimentation can kill any business quickly if it is costly […]

I’m excited to announce that as of today, I’m Koji‘s new Head of Creators. At Koji, I’ll be leading (and building) a creator success team that includes the sub-pillars of community, marketing, partnerships, business development, DevRel and more. Together with co-founders Sean and Dmitry, I’ll also be driving Koji’s product strategy going forward. Koji has […]

Friday, April 1 (no April fools!) is my last day at Google. My mom reminded me recently that when I started coding at the age of 12, my dream was to one day work at Google. I still can’t believe that this German high school dropout somehow managed to turn that into a reality some […]

I once wondered out loud why famous musicians are almost expected to burn out and overdose at some point in their careers, and other types of celebrities less so. I forgot who my partner was in that conversation, but they responded that it’s much harder to be a musician than to be an actor, because […]

If you’re like me, you faced this problem a thousand times: You browse through a Google slide deck, find an animated GIF or image that you want to save and put into another document, deck or resource, but there is no apparent way to do this. Is this sounds familiar, you’ve come to the right place.

Rex Woodbury publishes a great newsletter on Substack called Digital Native, and in his summary this week, he writes: While Web2 created enormous value, value always passed through a middleman. Centralized platforms—Facebook, Uber, Twitter, YouTube—control the data and make the rules. Web3 is about ownership. It’s about the direct connection between creators and consumers, obfuscating the […]

Yours truly was recently invited as guest to the JS Party podcast to talk about…not JS! If you’ve been wondering about where the the part of the web is going that is “content”, why it’s so critical to invest in it & the web creator landscape, and what Google is doing about it, I think […]

I’m a big fan of Core Web Vitals, and the cumulative set of criteria that Google calls “Page Experience”, and that is not a coincidence! In the many conversations I’ve had with AMP haters skeptics, most have asked “why we can’t just measure whether something is fast & user friendly” when talking about why only […]

I have some pretty big news. I, and thus, Google is hiring its first ever Creator Advocate. Now, you’d be forgiven for thinking “but wait, doesn’t Google already have plenty over at YouTube?” and indeed, YouTube has a set of amazing teams supporting creators on their platform. But I’m talking Google, not YouTube: And what […]

What makes a piece of content, or sub-platform truly open, and part of the open web’s content corpus? This turns out to be a deceivingly hard problem, because everyone I ask replies with a different angle of openness they care about. Over the years, smart folks like Tantek Çelik, Steven Pemberton and Brad Neuberg answered […]